The musings of a budding game designer with a penchant for the experimental.

Like with my posts on the uncanny and the abject, I am here providing the raw text of my description of the fantastic, a literary genre described by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. The fantastic (and Todorov) is extremely straightforward, but this particular theory is actually key to the work that I’ve been doing. As such, I may have spent a bit more time describing it than needs be, but I want to make sure everything is clear (something you can help me with). In any event, here is the text of the final theory being described by my thesis.

As in my last post, I am trying to make sure that my thesis writing is accessible to a wider audience. Since psychoanalytic theories are difficult to grasp without a psychoanalytic background, I am doing my best to distill texts down to meaning. This time, it is for Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, as described in Powers of Horror. Kristeva can be more difficult to understand than Freud, so I have tried to be redundant in my description of the abject. Although it is not required, the following text will have expected you to have read the previous passage on the uncanny.

Here is the section of my current MFA Thesis on Freud’s exploration of the uncanny, a kind of psychological horror. I am putting it here so that I can share it and see how incomprehensible (or not) the text is. Much of this is purposefully unedited.

I just thought I would make a quick post and describe some design ideas I am considering working on, particularly for MFA projects that may come up. These are not all of my ideas, but I tend to have new ideas and remember other ideas quite randomly. This is just a list and short description of each. They are in no particular order (except the order given by headings). If you are interested in one project or another, or would like to see a different project, just leave a comment!

Friday, I participated in my program’s yearly event, Open Studios, with the game I’ve been working on all quarter. Overall, it went pretty well. Four of us were stationed in an arcade on the third floor of the building, and we had quite a lot of traffic, despite being out of the way. There were four of us in the arcade and it was pretty busy. I won’t talk much about the event here, but I will talk about the version of the game I had for Open Studios.

I’ve been busy working away at My Childhood on the RS Anthony. It’s coming together rather slowly, mostly because of other obligations getting in the way, but that is just excuses. I want to make this process open and transparent, so I really want to give a long overdue post about what I’ve been doing. At the bottom of this post, I’ve put a lot of images that I’ve taken while I’ve been working. In this post, I’m going to first talk about what I’ve been working on, then about some changes I’ve made to the design, and finally what I’m going to be working on next.

In my last Designing with PGDI post, I answered some questions about the concept of My Childhood on the RS Anthony. These were questions about the tools I was using, the kind of control scheme I wanted, the perspective and look of the game. I also asked a slew of new questions to ask. These new questions were related to actual content for the game. Here I intend to answer those questions, or at least find a reasonable approximation.